I finally made it to Arlington Cemetery, this time taking 15 minutes on the metro (subway).
This place is massive and with over 300,000 people buried there there’s no wonder. As well as seeing a fair few famous people’s graves, JFK for one and probably walking past thousands more I witnessed turning out the guard and some form of military ceremony. I’m not sure what the correct term would be but it involved wreathes! It was interesting to watch, whatever it was.
I wandered over to the Lincoln Memorial (big Abe Lincoln sitting in a chair) and had a sit down to escape the sun for a little while. I got talking to a couple of girls that were also ‘seeing the sights’ of DC and walked together for a while. It was nice just to talk someone, as daft as it sounds. When I’ve been exploring a city for hours on end on your own, sometimes I’ve not said a word to anyone for over 10 – 12 hours. It doesn’t bother me too much but it’s always nice to have a change of pace now and again.
Although I didn’t have a close up look at the Whitehouse, it did appear a lot smaller than I thought it would. Not that impressive! The Washington monument (big spike) and the Capitol (where the U.S. congress does their stuff) were both very big and impressive. On my walk from the cemetery I saw a few helicopters fly right over my head. I could hear them a mile away. If you’ve ever seen the opening scene to Transformers – the eerie thud thud thud of the evil helicopter engine, well it was the same. One of them had ‘The United States of America’ on the side. Was it Marine 1? Maybe Obama flew over my head. That would have been interesting.
